On 4/1/06, Peter wrote: > > What is the significance of the "Cortex-M3" name? Is it just hype or is > > it some sort of improvement on regular ARM devices? > > Don't know. The ARM that these people sell is the enhanced type with the Thumb > instruction set embedded. That's a way to write ARM-like code using 16 bits per > word instead of 32. > http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/families/CortexFamily.html http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/archi-thumb2.html http://www.arm.com/Multimedia/DevCon2004_presentation.pdf Cortex-M3 is different from ARM7TDMI from Philips (LPC2xxx) and others. It does not support 32-bit ARM instructions. It only support thumb-2 instruction sets. So it is not an "enhanced type" but a real "microcontroller" type of ARM and will bring real low cost to ARM based MCU. However it is clearly targeted in the 8-bit MCUs and low end 16-bit MCUs. Regards, Xiaofan -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist